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A Rwandan government report on the assassination of then Rwandan president Juvenal Habyarimana in 1994 has implicated Hutu Power Movement leader Theoneste Bagosora as the mastermind.

The UN International Criminal Tribunal sentenced Bagosora to life in prison in 2008 for instigating Rwanda's 1994 genocide, in which 800,000 to one million ethnic Tutsis and Hutus were killed.

Bagosora served as a senior defense official in Habyarimana's administration.

The investigation, launched in 2007, interviewed 500 witnesses and reviewed thousands of documents. A ballistic expert team was brought in from the UK to conduct the inquiry.

"(The) assassination of Rwandan President Habyarimana was the work of Hutu extremists who calculated that killing their own leader would torpedo a power-sharing agreement known as the Arusha Accords," said the report.

"It is the opinion of the committee therefore that the… plane of President Habyarimana was shot down from Kanombe Military Barracks by elements of the Rwanda Armed Forces which controlled that zone," it said.

Habyarimana was returning from peace talks in Tanzania and planned to swear in a transitional government when his plane was shot down on April 6, 1994.

Cyprien Ntaryamira, the president of Burundi at the time, was also killed in the attack.